“IT IS NOT BY ACCIDENT, COMRADES…”

The hour in which the Soviet Union appears poised to go down in flames is, to say the least, an inconvenient moment for the United States’ most important asset for monitoring events in the USSR — Embassy Moscow — to go up in smoke.

At present, it cannot be determined what caused the blaze that effectively destroyed the embassy’s political, military and intelligence offices and severely disrupted secure conferencing and communications capabilities. The U.S. government may not know for some time whether deliberate action on the part of Soviet personnel is to blame or whether it was simply the inevitable result of accumulated neglect and dangerous operation of a structure that has been a fire hazard for years. (Indeed, this is the third conflagration in the old embassy building following a major fire in 1977 and a smaller blaze in an elevator shaft in 1988.) If the manner in which the KGB’s compromise of the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow was handled — involving more than a decade of covering up the problem and delaying corrective actions — is any guide, however, the American people may not find out the truth for years.

What is clear already, however, is that — whether the Soviet government was involved in arson or not — the Kremlin is the prime beneficiary of the devastating impact this blaze will have on the U.S. embassy’s operations. At a moment when the central authorities’ crackdown on the press, local and republic-level governments and the Soviet people has made it increasingly difficult to monitor conditions in the USSR, the effective loss of the principal U.S. asset for performing that function greatly facilitates Moscow’s efforts to:

• dissemble about the true purposes of its so-called political and economic "reform" policies;

 

• disrupt U.S. intelligence collection against, and local analysis of, the continuing Soviet military build-up and Moscow center’s escalating repression;

 

• reduce political and other contacts between U.S. embassy personnel and unauthorized Soviet interlocutors; and

 

• exacerbate greatly the already considerable degree to which U.S. embassy activities (in both the old and new buildings) in Moscow are compromised, by forcing American personnel to operate in still less secure facilities.

"Any communist worth his salt would say that ‘It is no accident, comrade,’ that the U.S. embassy was neutralized as the contest for power in Moscow reaches a fever pitch," said Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director. "At the very least, with Gorbachev entrusting ever larger responsibilities for ‘public safety’ to the KGB, we must assume that the Soviet firefighters who presided over the destruction of Embassy Moscow took pride in their work."